Danger is a constant in Yosemite National Park, where the towering cliffs, thundering waterfalls and rugged wilderness combine with an unusual knack among humans to stumble into horrifying predicaments.

Nobody knows that better than John Dill, who has been involved in almost every significant rescue in the park over the past 38 years, predating the formation of the esteemed Yosemite Search and Rescue team, of which he is an integral part.

He has pulled rock climbers off the big walls, plucked hikers out of gorges, saved swimmers from drowning and protected many a fool from himself.

Try to sing the praises of the 70-year-old ranger, though, and you will feel his wrath.

The National Park Service and the Interior Department took that risk Wednesday night by giving Dill an award for "superior service." The honor, essentially a lifetime achievement award, was bestowed at a catered dinner during a ranger reunion in Yosemite Valley. The ceremony was kept secret because everybody knew that Dill would never have shown up had he known such a thing was in the works.

"He's in competition for being the world's most modest man," said Lincoln Else, the former Yosemite climbing ranger and now the director of the Sierra Wilderness Education Project. "The truth is he's been extremely influential in the development of the search and rescue program, rescue techniques, and he has saved many lives."

Protest as he might, Dill is the brains behind Yosemite Search and Rescue, called "YOSAR" by almost everyone.

He arrived in Yosemite in 1970 after graduating from MIT with a degree in physics. He was just a rock climber then, dirt-bagging it in historic Camp 4.

At first he was among the volunteer climbers who were called upon when rangers needed help rescuing someone off a cliff. He was one of the first members of Yosemite Search and Rescue when the program was formally established in 1974.

Redirected search

The 1982 rescue of 10-year-old Donnie Priest in the wreckage of his parents' plane on 12,057-foot White Mountain was one of Dill's greatest moments. The boy, whose frostbitten lower legs had to be amputated, was rescued five days after his mother and stepfather crashed during a fierce winter storm.

Priest was found huddled behind the bodies of his parents only because Dill studied the topography, painstakingly plotted radar data, analyzed flight plans and the aircraft's capabilities, found a flaw and redirected the search to include White Mountain.

Priest, now 36 and the owner of a Vacaville business that fits prosthetics, lobbied the National Park Service to honor Dill.

"I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for him," said Priest, who attended the award ceremony. "I feel like I personally owe John Dill and the rest of the rescuers my life. By him getting an award, it takes some of the weight off of my shoulders."

Dill is famous for his innovative and sometimes unorthodox techniques. He has brought in hypnotists to jog the memories of the relatives of missing persons and even donned a dead man's climbing gear to see why it had failed.

Invented rescue techniques

Dill almost single-handedly invented modern helicopter rescue techniques off cliff faces. Such rescues were extremely rare until the 1980s, when Dill invented a system in which rescuers ferry food and supplies to climbers by tossing victims a baseball-size bag of sand attached to a thin nylon line that spools from a container. Climbers use the line to reel in supplies or hook themselves on to a rescue line.

The technique was used in October 2004 to help five climbers trapped on El Capitan during a snowstorm and to recover the bodies of two Japanese climbers.

McMillan said Dill uses his math skills to work out statistical probabilities of where lost hikers might go, how they might behave and what they might do. He has trained rescuers around the world.

"He is one of the most important pioneers of search and rescue techniques," said McMillan, whose husband was rescued by Dill, who swooped down from a helicopter after Tom McMillan broke his leg high up in the back country.

Yosemite Search and Rescue is now a force of at least a dozen highly trained technicians who get support from 20 expert rock climbers, nearly 100 park rangers and dozens of specialists - from scuba divers to search dogs - who are on call when circumstances demand.

200 missions a year

They handle more than 200 rescue missions a year. There were 241 operations in Yosemite last year. As many as two-thirds of those operations involve hikers, but Dill said many accidents never get reported because the victims do what he did in 1971 when he simply crawled out of the woods after a falling boulder broke his leg.

Some people - like Michael Ficery, an experienced backpacker from Santa Barbara - just vanish.

The 51-year-old went into the backcountry northeast of Hetch Hetchy in June 2005. The epic search that followed located his backpack on the side of a trail with a water bottle missing. Dill believes Ficery put his backpack down to get his bearings and then lost the trail in the deep snow or went to get water in a swollen creek and fell in.

"It drives us nuts, of course," Dill said. "Our goal is to find them, first because we want to save them, second for the benefit of their families and third for our own egos."

Dill said one of the eight people who vanished over the past 20 years was found recently.

"Just the other day, in a streambed about 100 feet from the road, a climber found a day pack of a woman who disappeared five or six years ago," Dill said.

Dill seems to enjoy tales of lucky breaks and miraculous saves, including the recent rescue of a man whose shorts caught on a rock, preventing a thousand foot fall off Half Dome. His reports about them are famous not only for their astute analysis but for their usefulness as cautionary tales.

One entertaining report was of the 2003 misadventure of 18-year-old Graham Becherer-Bailey, whose "canyoneering" adventure culminated in the curious decision to climb hand-over-hand down a giant cliff next to a waterfall in Tanaya Canyon in an extremely remote area. Becherer-Bailey lost his grip on the wet rope, fell more than 80 feet and broke his femur. Miraculously, he ended up lying on a rock in the one tiny spot within miles where his cell phone would work. He was saved after dialing 911.

Lucky survivor

After detailing a litany of mistakes and miscalculations by Becherer-Bailey, Dill wrote that "Graham was extraordinarily lucky, first that the fall did not kill him, second that his cell phone survived and third, that his call got through."

Dill hates words like "legendary" and "renowned," which are often used to describe him, but his colleagues say his modesty is almost as impressive as his resume.

"He'll deny it, but he is well renowned in the business," said Keith Lober, the head of Yosemite Search and Rescue. "Every person who is involved in SAR knows the John Dill name."

"Make no mistake," said Jim Sano, a former naturalist with the National Park Service who first spotted the crashed plane in which Priest was found, "there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of rescues that John was involved in. A lot of people owe their lives to him."

Legendary search

The first big case ranger John Dill was involved in became one of the great Yosemite legends. An airplane loaded with thousands of pounds of marijuana crashed into Lower Merced Pass Lake in 1976. When it was discovered six months later, people hiked in from all over, some in scuba gear, to gather up sacks of pot. The incident, now called "Dope Lake," required considerable investigation to track down the origin of the plane and find the owner.